Wed 23 Oct 2024
A Book! Movie!! Review by Dan Stumpf: JO PAGANO – Die Screaming // The Sound of Fury (1950).
Posted by Steve under Crime Films , Mystery movies , Reviews[3] Comments
JO PAGANO – Die Screaming. Zenith ZB-4, paperback, 1958. Published earlier as The Condemned (Prentice-Hall, hardcover, 1947), and by Perma Star 286, paperback, 1954. Film: The Sound of Fury (United Artists, 1950), re-released as Try and Get Me.
A little gem I recently picked up almost by accident is Jo Pagano’s Die Screaming, which was filmed in 1950 as Try and Get Me. I exaggerated just then for dramatic effect. Die Screaming is the Cheapo-house paperback reprint title of a work which was originally (and rather uninspiredly) titled The Condemned. And the title of the movie was originally (equally pretentious) The Sound of Fury. Fortunately for both book and movie, trashier heads prevailed.
Content-wise, they both book and film are intelligently done, but marred by attempts to pump Social Significance into their slender frames. Howard Tyler, broke, married with child, hard-working but jobless and luckless (well-played in the film by Frank Lovejoy) hooks up with smart guy Jerry Slocum and ends up pulling a few quick robberies.
As Howard flounders in bewilderment, the robberies turn into kidnapping and murder: Movie and book both brilliantly describe Howard’s total inability to come to grips with what has happened. Overwhelmed with guilt and fear, totally incapable of hiding his emotions from his family or even from strangers on the street, he seems like some vividly-drawn, well-tortured animal.
Unfortunately, both book and movie dissipate the energy of all this with endings that come off as self-important and preachy. But while the ride lasts, it has its moments. I particularly liked the intelligent writing that went into the Jerry Slocum character, played in the film by Lloyd Bridges. (An actor, it seems, who came to Hollywood too late. In an expanding film industry, he could have been another Dan Duryea.) The implicit sexuality of his dominance over Howard is cunningly conveyed in meaningless little requests that somehow sound like orders.
When I talk (as I often do) of the way cheap books and B-movies sometimes surprise one with the care and thoughtfulness that goes into them, I’m talking about efforts like Die Screaming.
October 26th, 2024 at 1:13 am
The “message” required to get away with making films like this one in the era often overwhelmed what went before. Here, it doesn’t ruin it, but the attempt is there.
Bridges had been bouncing around Hollywood since the Forties even headlining a serial (SECRET AGENT X-9) and appearing in a Warren William Lone Wolf entry and a Three Stooges. He got some good roles in big films like HIGH NOON and THE RAINMAKER, but seemed to have trouble busting out until he went to television, even fleeing to England to make films for a while like a lot of American actors in that era.
I always thought he was best suited to character and villain roles than leads.
October 30th, 2024 at 7:44 pm
The movie was based on an actual lynching in San Jose around 1936 that was first the basis for “Fury” with Spencer Tracy, then “Try and Get Me.”
There is newsreel footage and documentaries of the lynching on youtube.
The director had been a magician who showed Joe E. Ross who played the niteclub M.C., some tricks to play on the Frank Lovejoy character.
October 31st, 2024 at 1:16 am
Lloyd Bridges, yea. Kinda untapped potential. Flashes of brilliance, some fine moments. I remember him best in ‘The Goddess’ playing the hapless sports hero.
Can easily imagine how he might be really spooky in certain hard-nose parts. He had that special kind of intransigence, and rigidity. Like when he turned down Coop’s plea for help in ‘High Noon’. Cold!